Interactive telemedicine systems with telepresence have traditionally been available in stationary settings, predicated on the availability of a reliable, high bandwidth communication infrastructure between the locations of the physician and the patient, such as a rural clinic, ambulatory center, or assisted living facility, and vital-signs based telemedicine systems have traditionally been used for home monitoring of post-operative patients, preventative medicine, and for communications of patient self-administered tests where a reliable, high bandwidth communication infrastructure is not necessarily available and where the connectivity is of store-and-forward (non-interactive) nature, the remote comprising primarily of trended, incremental snapshots of streaming vital signs and/or a limited number of pre-recorded audio, video, and/or vital sign waveform snippets.
Currently available telemedicine systems are of limited value in mobile applications such as emergency medical assistance at the site of an accident or during patient transport to a medical facility, where telepresence is either not available or is not interactive, and/or streaming vital signs transmission is limited to selective snapshots taken at the initiative of an Emergency Medical Technician or physician assistant, therefore limiting the clinical effectiveness of the assistance provided by the remote physician.
Since the level and type of remote assistance available in such emergency situations is typically limited to the qualifications of the medical staff present within the medical facility where the fixed telemedicine terminal is located, hospitals are required to ensure adequate staffing coverage for all possible trauma conditions not knowing ahead of time the types of trauma present at the accident site.
Moreover, since most telemedicine systems are structured in a point-to-point fashion, multiple physician collaborations are limited to just the personnel available at the location where the fixed telemedicine terminal is installed.
Lastly, current telemedicine systems offer neither live pause, rewind, and play back capabilities which might be useful in real time remote review, assessment, and diagnosis of clinical conditions, events, and/or triggers such as arrhythmias, temporary drops in blood pressure, respiratory blockages, etc. for a more effective remote assistance of patients with critical or life threatening conditions, nor full session archiving and playback of audio, video, and streaming vital signs which could be useful for post case review related to insurance claims, liability litigation, and training or educational applications.
There is thus a widely-recognized need for, and it would be highly helpful to the advancement of the current standard of critical care to have, a telemedicine system which is devoid of all the above limitations.